Blender Crash Recovery in Windows XP

As stable as Blender may be, it's still possible to experience a crash. And whenever it does happen, the first priority is minimizing the amount of work loss. I recently experienced the rare crash and thought it might be a good idea to share how I was able to minimize the lost.

These steps are specific to Windows XP, but they should easily translate to other platforms.

So, you're staring at this thing:


Great! Now what?

Well, Blender has an AutoSave feature (hopefully, you have it enabled) that will allow you to retrieve at least some of the latest changes in your workfile. However, as a precaution, Do Not click on the "Don't Send" button found in the dialog box shown above. You want to be sure that the latest autosave file isn't "cleaned up" by Windows. Because this is a crash scenario, you really don't want to risk losing that backup file.

So, the next thing you want to do is go to the folder that Blender uses for temporary files. By default, this will be "c:\tmp".



In the temporary files folder, locate the most recent .blend file. This will be the latest autosave file created by Blender. You can click the Date Modified column to have the file listing sorted by the modification dates.



DragDrop (or Cut/Paste) this file to your Desktop.



Now, you can safely click the "Don't Send" button in the dialog box. Blender will be shut down but, you can be happy to know that you've secured the latest autosave file created by Blender!



Restart Blender and load the autosave file that you rescued. Review the scene's contents to figure out what may have been lost, if anything. Save the file using the name of the original scene file however, you might want to modify the name just to be safe and protect your original scene file. That's it!



If the AutoSave feature is new to you, let's take a quick look at it to be sure that you have it enabled. Go to the Auto Save tab located in the Preferences window.



Make sure the "Auto Save Temp Files" option button is pressed. Set the minutes as desired and you're set! If the AutoSave feature wasn't enabled, be sure to set it up as a default setting.

Also, be aware that the "Open Recent" button will not help in a crash recovery. You need to grab the temp file manually in a crash scenario.

Happy Blendering and let's hope you rarely have to use this info.

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